“Everything was flat, just like now,” says Tamba Kpaquoi (21). “No houses, nothing more.” He points around to the flat, rusty brown earth. The houses with their inhabitants are still buried under it. Five years ago, at the foot of one of the many hills surrounding the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown, there was still an entire residential area. Until August 14, 2017.
Kpaquoi walks to the approximate spot where his family’s house must have stood. He fiddles with his jeans with his hands. In the early morning of that August 14, Kpaquoi’s mother, his older brother, and his younger brother were covered in a torrent of mud, earth and boulders. Their bodies were never found, nor were those of many others.
At the time, Kpaquoi lived with his aunt, a few blocks away. He was to stay with his mother that night. “On the night before the disaster, my older brother called. He wanted to send a motorcyclist to pick me up. But it was raining very hard, I had never seen it so hard.’ Because of that rain, his aunt decided it was unwise to take to the road. “I said I’d come the next morning. That was the last contact I had with my family,” says Kpaquoi.
After a day and night of continuous downpour, the hill gave way. Most of the Mortomeh district was wiped out in one fell swoop. According to a World Bank report, 1,184 were killed, but residents say it must have been at least 2,000. It is the worst natural disaster in the history of the West African country.
sandbags
A gray sky appears above the hills near Mortomeh. A soft tap on the corrugated roofs announces the rain, which a moment later pours down in full force. August is the wettest month of the year in Sierra Leone. Gullies have been dug around many houses and sandbags have been stacked in the hopes of keeping the water out.
Construction is already underway on the hills around Mortomeh. “The next landslide will only be worse,” environmental activist Iyesha Kamara fears. It is no coincidence that such a major disaster took place here. It is a combination of deforestation and climate change. Freetown is sandwiched between the Western Area Natural Park, a protected area of tropical rainforest, and the Atlantic Ocean. The steep slopes of Sugar Loaf Mountain form the shadowy transition between city and jungle. “Sugar Loaf Mountain, the name says it all,” says Kamara. “If sugar gets wet, it dissolves.”
Freetown is a city on the move. The population has increased tenfold in the past fifty years. The capital is bursting at the seams. Almost half of the current inhabitants were born outside the city, according to government figures. Many people flock to Freetown hoping to find work. But most of them become dependent on the tropical rainforest for their livelihood. Due to a lack of electricity, wood and charcoal are the main energy sources in Sierra Leone. People cut down trees for sale, but also for their own fires.
Hundreds of thousands of people live on the steep slopes in and around Freetown due to overcrowding. In 2009 there was already a landslide that killed 103 people. ‘As long as there are enough trees to protect the soil, these types of hills are not vulnerable,’ says researcher Martin Drenth, who is doing PhD research on water-sensitive cities at the University of Groningen. But the houses creep further and further up the hills and into the nature park. ‘And with it the felling of trees and agriculture. It doesn’t necessarily go bald, but broccoli, for example, just doesn’t hold soil.’
A gaping hole
The crash site of five years ago is easy to recognize. Among the many steep, green hills around Freetown, one stands out. A reddish-brown, gaping hole disfigures the mountain; a river of boulders from top to bottom.
Kpaquoi suspects that his mother knew she lived in a dangerous place. “But she just had no other place to go.” The government had warned of the risk, but then did little to prevent the construction of new houses. And the people kept coming. “People are risking their lives just to live in Freetown,” says Kpaqoui.
The situation in Freetown is not unique. ‘A lot of cities worldwide are dealing with this problem,’ says researcher Drenth. ‘In these vulnerable cities, the government has no control over new construction. And economic interests often take precedence over protecting nature reserves.’
Climate change also plays a major role. In the weeks leading up to the Freetown disaster, there was three times as much rain as normal for the time of year. ‘Many cities are designed to drain the water, but more and more the point is reached that there is so much rain that it no longer works,’ says Drenth. One solution is to store water locally, for example in reservoirs ‘or by constructing a schoolyard or park that can be flooded’.
But cities like Freetown are most at risk because they don’t have the money to adapt to climate change. It international scientific panel IPCC warned about this this spring in front of. Between 2010 and 2020, floods, droughts and storms caused 15 times more deaths in poor countries than in rich countries. The irony is that, according to the IPCC report, Africa is hit hardest by the effects of climate change, while the continent is only responsible for 3 percent of global CO2 emissions.
‘We don’t sleep a wink’
“Every year in May, when the rainy season starts, everyone is afraid,” says Pa Conteh, elected village chief of Mortomeh in 2016. “Especially if it rains all night long. Then we won’t sleep a wink.’ The gaping hole is a daily reminder for the survivors of the disaster and the risks they face. Conteh would like to see the entire community moved, but there is no money. “We can’t go on with our lives like this, but we have no alternative. We have nowhere to go.’
Many people lost everything in the disaster: family and friends, their homes, all their savings and their fields. The village head himself was lucky, the natural disaster passed right by his house. A fence marks the disaster area a few meters from his house. Soldiers hang out at the gate. They have to guard the area, especially to prevent new houses being built.
The government did offer the people who lost their homes another shelter, but they could only stay there for a year. “Most people returned after that,” says Conteh. “Now they move from construction site to construction site for shelter.” He has made several requests on behalf of the community for a piece of land in a safe place, where the displaced persons can build their own homes. Without result. ‘The government just let us down’, he sighs. “We don’t even have a school anymore.”
Environmental Policy
In the run-up to the last presidential elections, which were held six months after the disaster, environmental groups tried to get climate higher on the political agenda. The Women’s Network of Environmental Sustainability (Wones) gave all party leaders a folder full of information and urged them to include environmental policy in their party programs. With some success. Sierra Leone has for the first time a Ministry of Environmentcharged with issues such as sustainability, nature conservation and climate adaptation.
The ministry just does not yet have the knowledge to tackle the problem properly. Iyesha Kamara, one of the founders of Wones, talks about the ambitious plan to plant five million trees in four years. The ministry asked the women’s organization to plant 10,000 trees in a southern district. ‘We got ten thousand coconut palms,’ says Kamara. ‘Unfortunately, they are not good for reforestation, because they have to grow in the shade of other trees.’
Wones also tries to raise awareness among the general public. For example, the organization has a school project where each child plants and cares for a tree. But as long as there is no good alternative as fuel, people will continue to cut down trees en masse. ‘We are working on a project to make briquettes from grass or coconut, which can easily replace charcoal’, says Kamara. “At first on a small scale, but hopefully we can roll it out.”
Flooded streets
Tamba Kpaquoi now lives on the other side of Freetown. He gives tutoring lessons, he saves the money he earns so that he can go to university. As the rainy season approaches its peak, he sees the consequences of poor drainage all over the city. Some streets are completely under water. “It makes me angry and sad,” he says. “It reminds me of my brothers, especially my younger brother. We always did everything together.’
The relatives do not yet know whether the government is organizing a commemoration on Sunday. Two years ago, President Julius Maada Bio came to the disaster site for the unveiling of a monument. On a granite block stand a man, a woman and two children, their arms spread and their eyes lifted to the sky. It is a beautiful monument, says village chief Pa Conteh, ‘but what good is it? I wish the government would listen to us more.’
International Climate Finance
At the climate summit in Glasgow at the end of last year, African countries and aid organizations emphasized the need to make poorer and more vulnerable countries more resilient to extreme weather. Already in 2009, the rich countries agreed that they would transfer 100 billion dollars annually from 2020 to a climate fund, intended for climate adaptation in poor countries, but that promise is far from being fulfilled.
In Glasgow, the rich countries presented a financing plan to achieve the promised amount by 2023. Developing countries insist on shared responsibility and argue that 100 billion is not nearly enough either. Yet new financial commitments have so far failed to materialize, despite hard evidence that poor countries are being disproportionately hit by climate change. The subject is expected to be high on the agenda at the upcoming climate summit, which is to be held in Egypt in November.